De Profundis, Berliner Ensemble, production notes, ideas and provocations.
“There is one sentence which, for me as an actor, is very important: the beginning and the end, they have to be different.”
These are reflections on experiencing this extraordinary performance at The Coronet Theatre, London, October 2026, including some spoilers.
There are notes from the post show Q&A (see previous post), which in particular sparked an exploration by me on Jens Harzer’s exploration of the work of the philosopher / Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Here this idea of the irreversible transformation of the self as a part of great theatre art was intriguing to me.
I also connected these ideas to thoughts on hiraeth (a welsh concept of longing for things lost) and to Wilde’s longing and suffering.
The Beginning and the End Cannot Rhyme
Oscar Wilde, Hölderlin, hiraeth, and the impossibility of returning to who we were.
There is a man in a box. He talks for almost two hours. He has very little room to move. There are lights, music and a few objects. Yet somehow an enormous world emerges.
The man is Jens Harzer, performing Oscar Wilde's De Profundis in a production by the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Oliver Reese. I saw it at the Coronet Theatre in London in October 2026.
Wilde's words have been translated into German by Mirko Bonné, spoken by Harzer, and translated back into English surtitles for the London audience. We are watching a German actor speaking an English writer's words, reading them back in English, while trying to understand something about a person who died more than a century ago.
And Harzer is not, strictly speaking, pretending to be Oscar Wilde.
I've been thinking about this performance for some weeks. In particular, an idea from the post-show discussion with Harzer and Reese. It concerned the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and the thought that the beginning and the end cannot rhyme.
I have been connecting this with the Welsh word hiraeth, a kind of longing for something lost or perhaps impossible to recover. (Which came from my podcast with Lucy Easthope)
I think the two ideas sit together.They have something to say about Wilde, theatre, memory and the people we once were.
Oscar Wilde and the man in the box
Wilde was imprisoned in 1895 after being convicted of gross indecency. At the height of his literary fame, with his plays being performed in London and his public identity almost inseparable from the performance of being Oscar Wilde, he lost nearly everything. Or maybe more than everything. His freedom, money, reputation and much of his family life.
During his imprisonment at Reading Gaol, he wrote an extraordinary letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, his former lover. The letter became known as De Profundis, from the Latin, out of the depths.
It is a difficult work to classify. Part love letter, part accusation, part confession, part philosophical meditation. Wilde moves between blaming Bosie for the destruction of his life and recognising his own responsibility. He thinks about suffering, Christianity, beauty, art and forgiveness. He attempts to explain a life that has gone catastrophically wrong.
Wilde revisits grievances, reconstructs incidents, sets out charges against Bosie. Sometimes he seems to want an apology. Sometimes an explanation. Sometimes he seems to be attempting to convince himself of a particular account of what happened.
Often unattractive; often lacking coherence but very compelling and utterly human. (as we are often not attractive, and not coherent).
The writing is extraordinary. The contradictions are part of what makes it human.
The underlying catastrophe was not simply a failed relationship. Wilde was imprisoned by a society that criminalised intimacy between men, subjected to a punishment that destroyed much of his life. The story of his relationship with Bosie should not obscure that. Most (I’d like to think) - although not all - of society has moved forward from that.
Nevertheless, Wilde is attempting through language to understand what has happened to him.
This is one reason why De Profundis makes such an unusual theatrical text. Almost all the action has happened before the performance begins. Bosie is absent. There is no conventional dramatic plot, no trial to watch unfold, no rescue or reconciliation to anticipate.
There is simply a man speaking words.
And yet the evening is utterly theatrical.
In the post-show discussion, Harzer and Reese talked about approaching Wilde through the language rather than through conventional biographical impersonation.
Harzer is not attempting to imitate Wilde's voice or mannerisms, or recreate a historically authentic Oscar Wilde. He is a German actor, with his own body, memories and history, speaking words written in another language and another century.
This interested me because I've been thinking about what it means for an actor to become someone else. Or to pretend to become someone else.
We often praise actors for disappearing into their roles. We say that someone was Hamlet, or became Lear. Yet that cannot really be what happens.
Harzer cannot become Wilde. Nor can we know precisely what Wilde felt when he wrote the letter. We have his words, biographies, historical records and competing interpretations. But the entirety of his inner experience is unavailable.
Rather than seeing this as a limitation, Harzer and Reese seem to have found a different theatrical possibility. The actor can make Wilde's language alive in the present without claiming to become the historical person.
The body and voice of the performer are not merely instruments transmitting words. They make meaning. A phrase can move between tenderness and accusation, conviction and exhaustion, through the smallest changes of emphasis, movement or stillness.
The set develops this idea beautifully.
Hansjörg Hartung's design confines Harzer within a small enclosed space, described in the discussion as something like an empty book. There is very little physically present. Yet through light, music and performance, this almost empty box gradually fills with an entire interior world.
It is a prison. But also a room of memory, perhaps the inside of a mind.
There is an interesting paradox here. An actor who has almost nowhere to move appears to travel an enormous distance.
Perhaps because the audience is required to imagine the journey.
I've noticed something similar, though through very different means, in the Wooster Group's Nayatt School Redux, (see earlier blog) which reconstructs fragments of an earlier production through archival footage, sound and live performance. It makes the machinery of reconstruction visible. Performers remember and recreate other performers, including people who are no longer alive.
These works are quite different, but both seem interested in the impossibility of perfectly recovering another person.
There is always a gap between the person and their representation, between the past and our attempt to reconstruct it.
Theatre does not necessarily close that gap. It can make the gap itself interesting. This also contrasts with AI. AI does not become human. It is AI. And human performance feels to me safe (from AI substitution in this sense) from that as a human experience. We are watching humans being human. (see earlier blog on this)
Hölderlin: the beginning and the end cannot rhyme
Towards the end of the performance, Harzer's appearance changes. His clothing and hair are altered, and the final sequence suggests an emergence from the enclosed space. But it does not feel like a conventional liberation or return.
In the discussion afterwards, Harzer referred to Hölderlin.
I subsequently went back to Hölderlin's writings on tragedy, particularly his remarks on Oedipus, and the idea of a categorical reversal.
Hölderlin's argument is difficult, and I would not claim to have mastered it. But one way of reading the reversal is that a decisive event interrupts the continuity of a person's existence. What comes afterwards cannot simply be reconciled with what came before.
The beginning and the end cannot rhyme.
THis is very intriguing.
We are accustomed to thinking about our lives as narratives with some degree of continuity. We encounter difficulties, overcome obstacles, learn things, grow. Often the stories we tell ourselves have a circular quality. We leave home, undergo an experience and eventually return, perhaps older or wiser, but recognisably ourselves.
This is also the structure of many familiar stories, from myth to contemporary film.
Hölderlin offers something more disturbing.
Some experiences make return impossible. (maybe first ime you fall in love, first time you experience death; you are forever changed and can not unchange)
The person at the end cannot be the person at the beginning. Te person who experienced them has been fundamentally altered.
Wilde's imprisonment seems like this
The Oscar Wilde who leaves Reading Gaol cannot be the Oscar Wilde who entered. He might wish to return to his former life, his former relationships, his artistic confidence and public identity. He might even succeed in recovering some of the external conditions of that life.
But he cannot recover the person he was.
The experience has happened. It is now part of him.
Nor does this necessarily imply wisdom or improvement.
There is a familiar idea that we emerge from suffering stronger, wiser or more authentic. This is attractive, particularly when we consider the extraordinary writing Wilde produced in prison.
But maybe under this reading - it is misleading.
Wilde was already a remarkable artist before prison. His imprisonment did not create the artist. It damaged, and in important ways destroyed, a flourishing artistic life.
The fact that he produced something extraordinary from the experience does not justify the suffering. Nor does his attempt to find meaning in it imply that the meaning was worth the cost.
…this distinction matters.
We can recognise that suffering changes us without assuming it improves us. There may be events that diminish rather than enrich a life. There may be losses without compensating gains.
This is one of the more interesting implications of Hölderlin's thought. The reversal need not be redemptive.
The ending does not have to complete the beginning, nor explain why everything that came before was somehow necessary.
Sometimes the rupture is simply a rupture.
Hiraeth: longing for a home we cannot return to
There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which I have become interested in through thinking about literature and theatre after speaking to Lucy Easthope (my conversation with Lucy Easthope, the disaster recovery expert and author of When the Dust Settles.)
It is often translated as homesickness, nostalgia or longing, although each of these English words captures only part of its meaning. There is a sense of grief for something lost, perhaps a person, place, home or way of life that cannot be recovered.
One particularly interesting interpretation extends it towards longing for a home that may never have existed quite as we remember it.
hiraeth offers a powerful way of thinking about memory and loss.
We often long for the past. Sometimes for people who have died, places that have changed, or the experience of being young. Sometimes, I suspect, for versions of ourselves.
Memory can preserve something extraordinarily vividly. A particular room, an afternoon, a person, the way the light fell, or how we felt at a certain moment in our lives.
We might return to the same room, meet the same person, even recreate many of the external circumstances.
But the experience will not be the same.
Because we are not the same.
This is where I think hiraeth and Hölderlin's categorical reversal connect.
Hiraeth describes the longing for what has been lost. Hölderlin helps explain why some forms of return are impossible.
The difficulty is not simply that the home we remember has changed, or that a person has died, or that a particular world has disappeared. Even if the external world could be restored, we ourselves have lived through the intervening years.
The person who wishes to return is no longer the person who left.
There is also a more subtle difficulty.
Our memories of the past are not fixed records. They are continually reconstructed in the present. The person remembering changes, and with that change comes a different understanding of what happened.
A happy childhood memory might acquire a different meaning when revisited as a parent. An old relationship might look quite different after experiencing other relationships. We may come to understand something about our younger selves that was invisible to us at the time.
Perhaps the past changes meaning as we change.
This seems especially relevant to Wilde.
His letter to Bosie is full of longing, but also anger and recrimination. He longs for the relationship, for freedom, for beauty and for his former life. Yet the very process of writing is a reassessment of that past.
Wilde's relationship with Bosie as a beautiful love destroyed by imprisonment is far too simple. It was turbulent, extravagant, sometimes destructive. Wilde seems to recognise this, intermittently, even as he seeks to preserve the beauty of what he remembers.
The letter oscillates between self-recognition and self-justification.
Wilde is mourning a lost world. But more than that he is reconstructing that world from the perspective of someone who can no longer inhabit it.
The past he wants to return to is partly a creation of the person he has now become.
This makes the longing more complicated than ordinary nostalgia.
We do not simply mourn the past as it was. We mourn the past as we now understand, or imagine, it to have been.
There is another aspect of Hölderlin that seems relevant here. In his novel Hyperion, he explores separation, longing and the desire for a lost or ideal unity.
I see a connection between that longing and hiraeth. Both suggest the possibility that what we seek is not simply geographically or temporally distant but impossible to recover in its original form.
Perhaps the unity we remember was never quite what we imagine.
Or perhaps it was real, but the experience of losing it has made its recovery impossible.
Either way, there is no straightforward return.
Storytelling of the soul
In the post-show discussion, the phrase storytelling of the soul was used.
I am usually suspicious of phrases like this. What exactly does it mean to tell the story of someone's soul? We cannot observe another person's interior experience directly. We certainly cannot verify Wilde's inner life through a theatrical performance.
Yet I think the phrase points towards something interesting.
Harzer's performance does not attempt to establish a definitive account of who Wilde was. It allows the contradictions to remain.
Wilde can be bitter, loving, vain, generous, self-deceiving and perceptive, sometimes almost simultaneously. There is no requirement to reconcile these qualities into a coherent psychological portrait.
Perhaps storytelling of the soul is not an attempt to explain a person but to make their contradictions available to us.
This also relates to the question of catharsis, which arose during the discussion.
Do we need a performance to produce a particular emotional release? Should we leave the theatre having learnt something definitive about Wilde, or ourselves?
Harzer resisted the idea of a predetermined catharsis.
I liked that
Some performances produce an immediate, powerful emotional experience and then fade rather quickly in memory. Others are more puzzling at the time but continue to grow and acquire meaning afterwards.
I suspect De Profundis belongs to the second category.
I found it mesmerising in the moment. The concentration of Harzer's performance, the extraordinary compression of the space, the way the words created a world that the set never attempted to illustrate.
But what has stayed with me is the idea of irreversible change, and how this intersects with memory and longing.
I have been working on a small piece of theatre called Mirror Man, which begins with looking at myself in the mirror and thinking about identity, ageing and memory. (Scratch performance on Dec 19 in London)
A face changes gradually. We seldom notice the daily alterations. But look at photographs taken twenty or thirty years apart and the differences are extraordinary.
There is continuity, of course. The same eyes, perhaps the same expressions and gestures. But there are also people we used to be who no longer exist.
I am interested in the gap between the face we see now, the person we remember ourselves being, and the person other people see.
It is another version, perhaps, of Hölderlin's reversal and hiraeth. The younger self remains available in memory, yet is inaccessible to us as an experience we can inhabit again.
And this extends to the audience. Someone who watches De Profundis again in ten years will bring a different life to the performance. Perhaps more experiences of love or loss, perhaps different ideas about art, identity or suffering.
Even if the performance were identical, the encounter would not be.
The artwork may remain the same. The person experiencing it has changed.
What remains
I keep returning to the idea of the empty book / space / box. (cf Peter Brook).
Harzer is almost motionless inside a small box. Through language, light, music and the audience's imagination, that space becomes an enormous interior world.
There is something beautifully economical about this.
Theatre does not need to recreate the whole of Reading Gaol, Victorian London, Wilde's rooms or his relationship with Bosie. It needs a person, some words, time, and an audience willing to imagine.
We know it is artificial. We know the actor is not Wilde. We know the box is not a prison cell.
Perhaps the experience is powerful partly because we know these things.
Theatre can bring us towards another person's experience without pretending to abolish the distance between us. It can attempt to reconstruct the past while acknowledging that perfect reconstruction is impossible.
And in this case the form of the performance seems to echo its central philosophical idea.
Harzer begins as a particular figure, in a particular space. By the end, his appearance and the meaning of that space have changed. The person we encounter at the end cannot simply be the person we encountered at the beginning.
The beginning and the end cannot rhyme.
I am not sure that watching the performance transformed me. I would be wary of making that claim. It would itself create a rather neat narrative arc: I entered the theatre as one person, encountered Wilde's suffering, and emerged with some new and profound understanding of life.
I don't think that is what happened.
I watched a remarkable actor perform an extraordinary text. I listened to an interesting discussion afterwards. I went home and carried on with my ordinary life.
But the thought has stayed with me.
We remember, we long, and we change. These three things are not always compatible.
Sometimes we long for what no longer exists. Sometimes for what might never quite have existed. And sometimes what we are really longing for is the person we were when we experienced it.
We cannot necessarily go back. Even when the place is still there, even when the person is still alive, even when the memory remains vivid.
The impossibility of returning does not mean that nothing remains. We can carry memories, create art, find new meanings and continue to love. But these are not restorations of the past. They are part of what comes afterwards.
And what comes afterwards need not rhyme with what came before.